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Fig Paste for Filling
Three-quarters of a pound of figs cut into small pieces, ¾ pound brown sugar, ¼ pound seeded raisins, 1 cup water and the juice of half a lemon. Stew on back of stove until very soft, remove and add a dessert-spoon vanilla. Then put all through meat-grinder, and to clear grinder use 2 or 3 crackers. If desired, the cracker dust may be stirred into the paste. It is then ready for use and will keep indefinitely. Delicious between thin, delicate crackers or thin slices of brown bread. It may also be put on thin slices of Five Roses bread buttered in layers and cut down like cake. Selected.
A cooked dried-fruit paste, thick enough to spread. The only real technique is patience: the figs must go completely soft before grinding, or the paste stays gritty.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range the back was the coolest zone, holding a bare simmer for an hour or more. On a modern hob use the lowest setting with a lid ajar, and check every 15 minutes; 45 minutes to an hour will collapse the fruit. Add a splash of water if it threatens to catch.
- The figsDried figs, not fresh — three-quarters of a pound is about 340 g, roughly 2 cups chopped. Snip off the hard stem nubs. Turkish or Calimyrna both work; black Mission gives a darker, jammier paste.
- Dessert-spoonAn old dessert-spoon is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons. Note that the vanilla goes in off the heat, which keeps the aroma.
- Meat-grinder or food processorA food processor does this in 30 seconds and needs no crackers to clear it. If you use a grinder, the fine plate, and run it twice for a smooth paste.
- The crackersTwo or three plain soda crackers or water biscuits, crushed. They were a way to push the last of the paste through the grinder; stirred back in they thicken it slightly and dull the sweetness a little. Skip them if you use a processor.
- "Will keep indefinitely"It will not. The sugar is high but so is the water content, and there is no seal. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within two or three weeks; discard at any sign of mould or fermentation.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no yield; the ingredients alone come to about 1 3/4 lb before cooking, so expect nearer 3 cups of paste than 1 1/2. Spread it while barely warm — cold from the fridge it tears thin bread.
Fig paste belongs to the brief, specific fashion for the "dainty sandwich" — thin, crustless, sweet or savoury, cut small and served at afternoon teas, church socials and card parties. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from 1913 onward, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, though the closing "Selected." is harder to read with confidence: it may mark a recipe the editors picked up from elsewhere rather than one sent in by a contributor. The layered-and-sliced variation at the end is essentially a ribbon sandwich loaf, a party dish that stayed in North American community cookbooks for decades. Commercially, the same idea was already on shelves — fig-filled bar biscuits had been made by machine in the United States since the 1890s — but a home cook with dried figs, brown sugar and a hand-cranked meat grinder could produce the filling herself for a fraction of the cost.